More Interview Humor

Interview Bloopers Make Full Employment a Dream
By Lawrence Van Gelder
of The New York Times

Full employment. Politicians promise it. But can it ever than a glorious mirage as long as there are job applicants who rearrange the interviewer's office furniture, change soiled diapers on the personnel manager's desk or fall asleep between questions? Some job seekers are equipped with self-destruct buttons.


Fred Siegel, the president of an executive search and human resources consulting corporation in Manhattan, remembers one interviewee in particular.

"We were interviewing for a very senior banking position for perhaps the most conservative bank in the United States, and our prime candidate arrived with no shoes," he said. "The strange thing was, she didn't seem to notice."

It happened this way: The candidate took an overnight flight from San Francisco to New York and was exhausted by the time her plane landed. Bound for the 9:30 a.m. interview, she got in a taxi, took off her shoes and fell asleep during the fide into the city. "She left her shoes in the taxi, and came immediately to the interview, without actually realizing she wasn't wearing them," Siegel said.


But Siegel said his strangest interview was with a person he calls Pill Man. A candidate for an investment banking position, Pill Man arrived looking very dapper and carrying an alligator briefcase. He sat down, and while Siegel was reviewing his resume, opened his briefcase, took out 15 bottles of pills and lined them up along the edge of Siegel's desk. Then he took out three cans of soda and placed them strategically in the line.

Siegel said nothing.

As the interview began, the candidate opened a soda and the first five pill containers and started taking his pills.

'Siegel said, "He never said a word to me about the pills, and I never said a word Ito him. Other than that, it was a good interview.'


1n 19 years of human-resources w6rk, Ruth Dorter of Queens, MY has met a number of memorable, self -defeating applicants. There was the woman who washed her underwear in the restroom sink. .(Dorter learned of the event when a colleague knocked on her door during the interview and asked the sink be cleared for normal use.)


Then there was the candidate who said he had heard about the job opening from the shah of Iran. (At the time, the shah had been dead for about 10 years.)


And there was the candidate whose cellular phone rang during the interview. He asked Dorter to excuse herself. He took the call.


Selby Drate of Sparks, Nev., outside Reno, remembers the young woman who answered an advertisement for a clerical position and was called for an interview. She arrived with her parents.

They asked and answered all the questions.

The job, Drate recalls, went to another candidate, who flew solo through the interview


Deborah Hunter of Atlanta has indelible recollections of the days when she was a member of her law firm's hiring committee. A colleague had a habit of asking each law student who applied to describe one thing that was not on his resume of which he was proud. One young man neither paused nor blinked before replying: "Well, I'm particularly good in bed."

Then there was the applicant who had just completed his first year at a top-20 law school. Hunter asked, "So how did you do in your first year?"

He replied, "I'm the last person in my class."

Surprised that he didn't sugarcoat his answer by saying he was in the bottom half or quarter, Hunter asked, "How do you know that? "

The answer, he promptly revealed, was easy. "Everyone who did worse than me dropped out," he said.


Lorin Preston Gill, the president of a small filter-manufacturing business in Rochester, NH., was interviewing a candidate for a job that combined driving and production work. The applicant explained that he had lost his license and wouldn't be able to drive.

GUI figured that he could shift some other employees around to handle the road chores, and he arranged for the candidate to have an interview a week later with the head of production. Gill shook hands with the prospect, and off he went.

"A few minutes later," Gill writes, "I saw him driving away."


Mary Federico remembers the flamboyantly dressed, wild-haired, heavily ? made-up woman who applied for a saleswoman's job some years ago at a telecommunications company that was beset with financial problems. Given the company's precarious fiscal state, Federico felt obligated to ask the woman, as she had all job candidates, "How do you feel about risk?"

The woman replied, "Well, I ride a Harley" Then she paused and said, "But I've been clean for four years."

 

 


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